It’s taken me a while to decide what to take on my trip (not helped by Pippin carefully depositing a dead mouse in my case!) but the case is all packed now and I’m off to the airport shortly. Hopefully my next post will have some good pics of New Zealand to make everyone jealous! Do please email me to let me know if you’re reading the blog.
Christine Bruce is a leading expert on Information Literacy. She is based at Queensland University of Technology and has published extensively on this topic. Her ideas have informed a lot of the work we’ve done at Newcastle. I am delighted to say that she has offered to visit Newcastle on 2nd April 2007 and run a workshop based around her paper “Six frames for IL”. The workshop will be sponsored by QuILT and will include some other speakers, still to be finalised. It will be of interest to library, academic and staff development staff. Put the date in your diary now!!
Today I was invited to talk to a meeting of the Durham School Librarians about information literacy and my NTF project. Eleven people attended and I thoroughly enjoyed meeting them all. I think we agreed that the info lit challenges faced by school librarians are very similar to those faced by university librarians – issues about whose responsibility it is, needing to have an institutional commitment and especially the issue of time. With such a structured curriculum there was a general feeling that teachers are inclined to spoon feed info to students to get good grades and that changing learning habits gets a low priority. Several members of the group are keen to assist with running my survey in their schools, which is great, as it will give me a much broader based set of data.
LIMES – Library and Information Management Employability (and the website really is lime!)
The LIMES project is working with LIS academics to create teaching materials which can be used in library schools to help people studying to be librarians learn more about information literacy. This is a definite gap in current librarianship courses, so should be very welcome.
I have been invited to a workshop looking to create a Community of Practice amongst LIS academics to share teaching materials. It will be on 23rd Nov in Birmingham.
I wonder whether the CoP might extend to those of us involved in staff training in libraries – there may be things we can use to help with staff development and also contribute to a central resource. If anyone has any comments please let me know and I’ll raise them at the workshop.
This National Teaching Fellowship project is looking at the conflicts and congruencies between staff and student perceptions of information literacy in the transition into higher education, particularly in Chemistry and English. It is developing 3 main strands: Strand one: How people perceive IL and how it fits into teaching and learning. Strand two: A pragmatic view of the transition into HE, information related issues which students face and where the university library fits into the picture. Strand three: Visits and networking – opportunities to make contacts in the IL field and discover what is happening elsewhere.
I was very fortunate to be awarded one of the 50 NTFs from the Higher Education Academy in 2005. As well as awarding me £50,000, the Fellowship has been an excellent way for me to make new contacts and expand my horizons a little. The money is enabling me to take a period of research leave from work in order to carry out a research project and also to travel to meet information literacy experts elsewhere (particlularly in Australia and New Zealand!!) The photo shows me accepting the award from Bill Rammell, Minister for Higher Education.